How to track deployments?

Question

What is a good way to track deployments of our code base? I would like to be able to see when a version was deployed on a specific server, who released it, what issues were solved by it, etcetera.

Currently we have a deployment tool that generates an issue in our issue tracker with all this information. This makes it easy to link the release issue against related issues, but it also pollutes our issue database.

We also want to start with Continuous Integration internally, which would mean there would be a ton more release issues.

Are there better ways of tracking releases?

Our technology stack is PHP (Symfony2) using Phing as a build system, a custom, web-based deployment tool, Mantis for bugtracking and Bitbucket for repository hosting.

Answer 1

You can use something like Beanstalk or dploy.io to deploy your apps. It will give you an ability to manage deploy permissions, see a timeline of all deployments (who deployed what and when), trigger deployments with a single click and notify your team via email and integrations when something is deployed.

You can get an idea from this screenshot:

http://cl.ly/image/3C1v1w2C3K2v

P.S. I work at Wildbit, company that makes both products.

Answer 2

You should check out my company's product BuildMaster, it was designed to solve every problem you've listed.

At this time we do not yet have the first-class integration with Mantis, but it can be added pretty easily via extensibility in the same way as the other bug/issue trackers we integrate with. It could be either built by your team if you are interested in that or our team contingent on an Enterprise edition purchase.